Saw this over at Chris Anderson’s blog, which got me thinking. He was talking about how to relearn programming and do actual coding in order to do research and analytics for his book, the Long Tail (if you haven’t heard of this, you’re probably hiding underneath a rock somewhere).

What actually struck me is that Chris Anderson, the creator of the Long Tail meme, actually does know how to code. By himself! It’s heartening: I don’t know how many of you guys out there are always typecast, but I know that I’m always the “Tech” person. I actually hate that, because I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I write music. I think I grok marketing. And PR. And I code.

So you have to pigeonhole me as a “Tech” guy?

At least now I feel like, yeah, there’s a kindred soul - I’m like Chris! Except maybe 1/100th as smart. Heh…

How many of you guys get pigeonholed on a daily basis?

Ramblings | No Comments »

It’s funny that I happen to stumble upon this article right after I wrote my previous post: SandHill.com | Management | The Birth of Enterprise 2.0.

As far as misunderstood terms, I think Enterprise 2.0 has even more misunderstandings behind it than Web 2.0. As for me, I’ve decided to spend a little more time in this space as that’s where I earn my bread and butter now, and I’m learning from the bottom up (i.e. users up not CIO down) the real needs of company users out there.

And among all the stuff I read on Enterprise 2.0, I agree with this one the most. However, while I do agree that the Enterprise space is highly highly complex, I do believe that the solution is to simplify.

More about that in my next post.

Technology, Enterprise 2.0, Geek | No Comments »

It seems that the Enterprise 2.0 meme has not gained the momentous heights of Web 2.0.

I’ve got my own thoughts around it… To me, the new wave of innovation in the Enterprise (as what the term Enterprise 2.0 implies) is not only in the realms of Knowledge Management. But reading most of the more influential stuff on Enterprise 2.0 (check Technorati out) implies that it’s only about Wikis, Blogs and collaboration.

That, I think, has and will continue to curse the term. Here’s my version of The New Enterprise Landscape (short of writing an whole essay on it - because I’m not as brilliant as Mr. O’Reilly):

• Rich user interfaces (AJAX and what not) and web-based applications in the Enterprise as the de-facto standard.
• A focus towards usability within the Enterprise, and applications that users will actually enjoy using instead of dread using (overheard in my client’s company - A: “So you have to use SAP?” B: “Yup” A: “Condolences” B: “Thank you! You feel my pain!”.
• The adoption of consumer technologies. Blogs, wikis yes… but so much more than that. IM has been around and gaining ground in the Enterprise. Salesforce.com has led the way in integrating Skype into its CRM. Why can’t Google Maps be mashed up into an Enterprise application for instance? Or creating a social network in place of an Exchange or Notes address book? Or consumer search relevance technology for Enterprise search? Or Peer to Peer?
• A shift from large “enterprise” solutions, to small purpose built applications fulfilling single purposes each.
• Shifting workload (or power) from IT departments and senior management to the common worker on the ground - empowerment of the lower levels through technology! That’s going to happen, and management guru-types are already evangelizing empowerment of staff. And the technologies that are going to make that happen won’t be collossal enterprise suites.
• Price correction. Top dollar is paid for top brands right now (SAP, HP, EMC), but the price differential between big brands and mid-tier solutions are at too much of a disparity right now. In the future, it will be much cheaper. Economics demands it, shrinking budgets demands it, but company politics will hamper that since top brands have a lion’s share as reliability continues to be a main concern - and big boys exude reliability whether its real or imagined.

In fact, the shift has already been happening. And it will gain momentum. However, it will gain momentum slowly. After plowing millions into suites, the transformation is going to be slow. It’s kinda like replacing a city with all new buildings. But surely, the Enterprise is undergoing a sea change slow as it might be.
And I want to be there as that happens.

Ramblings, Enterprise 2.0 | No Comments »

Here’s the funny thing about technology - I’ve mentioned before that technology should help current business processes, and that as far as possible, should not dictate the process. This article that was sent to me got me thinking about that. Short summary, it’s about how content management systems need to be customized to fit the processes, and not the other way round.

I do agree with the post, but as I’m working on a document-related project right now, experience teaches me that it’s not really as clear cut as this. In a lot of cases, the company actually needs technology to help them define the processes, because a process is either currently lacking, or needs to be improved.

Here’s my take - choosing an off-the-shelf (or an off-the-sourceforge) solution and deploying it as is into an enterprise is not very wise. The enterprise will definitely have current work-styles and processes in place that will not fit into the system, and forcing people into a box has always proven to be a failing endevour.

However, thinking about processes from a technology point of view (or rather a systems POV) will help identify gaps in the processes that needs to be fixed. And for that, some off-the-shelf features will help, because they fix a gap in the process that was ignored in the first place.

For example, if let’s say a Mandy wants to send something to her boss Joe Luddite to approve, but Joe does all his approvals through his PA… what is the system supposed to do? That’s a gap. Forcing Joe to do the approvals himself might not be the solution (lack of time, and practically speaking nothing will get approved if the volume of requests are too large). Giving the PA access to approve isn’t the solution either. So it’s a gap in the process but it has to be addressed.

There isn’t a clear cut solution to cases like this, and in most cases do depend on other factors (work-style, audit and governance concerns, company policy etc.).

Here, thinking of content management (and here I mean Enterprise Content Management in particular) as discrete products falls apart. However, thinking of ECM as a customized solution is also prohibitive - in terms of cost, configurability and variable quality - the customized solution in the wrong vendor’s hand is disaster for sure.

Instead, the system will have to be a bit of both off-the-shelf and still be flexible enough to customize to the way people work (people first and foremost before all else!). I’m hoping I’ve achieved a bit of that in what I’m working on right now.

Technology, Enterprise 2.0 | No Comments »

Geek out time! There are a lot of places on the web that keep telling you about the merits of purely CSS based design, and avoiding the use of tables (A List Apart is one example). But reasons cited have always seemed to theoratical to me; it’s always along the lines of “separate aesthetic form and programmatic function, keep pages semantically pure” and multiple other justifications that, while true and appropriate, require a 5,000 page dictionary to comprehend.

I’ll now try to explain it in really simple terms that web designers (by that I mean Imageready-junkies and Dreamweaver-dependents) can understand. And I’ll state it out in point form (a vestige from my army days I think):

1. Love your colleagues - Show your programmer colleague some love. You can’t imagine how torturous it is for a developer to work through 500 nested tables just to find out where the data goes. Imagine reading a book where the words “the” and “is” are repeated 500 times for no apparent reason. It’s like that - infuriating. So your colleagues may be like geeky and all, but doesn’t mean you should torture them for their lack of fashion sense and what not. Learn CSS!
2. Love your design - Do you love your own design? Enough to protect it no matter what? Then you might be better off expending the effort and learning how to do CSS-based designs. I think anyone who has worked with programmers on the team have witnesses how the lazier programmers have this tendency to shred through designs, leaving 1-pixel gaps between sliced images where there were none, and totally ruining a design so painstakingly sliced into HTML by your trusty Imageready program.Only you can stop this insanity. Not by threatening the programmer with death, but by adopting CSS-based design. You see, the programmer has absolutely no need to touch your CSS files in 99% of cases, so in essence he/she has no need to touch your designs at all, down to the last pixel in your layout. So your design is untouched.
3. Love your users - There are a multitude of reasons why CSS-based websites are better for users. CSS files are cached across pages, the code-base becomes neater and smaller in size, and it becomes easier for search engines like Google to read your sites. I’m not going to be the guru on this, but just Google for the reasons why XHTML is better than HTML and you can find a multitude of other reasons. And get this - designing in CSS makes it much easier to allow blind people to hear your site, or to let the older folks with poor eyesight like me in increase the font size (something called accessibility). Oh, and trust me on the poor eyesight thing… my monitor is set to 1600 x 1050 pixels on a 15.4 inch screen. Words are mighty small, and I know how it feels!
4. Love yourself - This is pretty important. If you know CSS-based designs, you are going to be pretty hot in demand job-wise. In fact I’m looking for one myself! (shameless plug: if you’re interested, please mail me at adrian.lee @ utopia-edge.com). On top of that, you learn something new, and you can start boasting about your mad skillz and start becoming an uber among your peers.

And I’m not the only one. Here’s an interesting site with 55 reasons! Also, this is in response to several posts I read about designers and programmers, but mostly from a programmer point of view. I’m a little bit of both so I do think I kinda know where the two camps are coming from. But I do admit that these four points only begin to scratch the surface. Still, while I’m not like really hardcore, it’s in my belief that EVERYONE should start doing this.

Resources: CSS Layout Techniques, YUI Library, Layout Gala, CSS Zen Garden

Technology, web 2.0, browsers, Code, Geek, web design, css | 12 Comments »